A crazy-ass white supremacist is trying to take over a small North Dakota town

When Craig Paul Cobb moved to the small North Dakota town of Leith, he moved there with a plan. The 61-year-old white supremacist, wanted for hate crimes in Canada and banned from Estonia, wanted to turn the 19-person town into a haven for “hard core” white nationalists and Nazis.

He moved to the town about a year ago, and since then has been quietly buying up vacant property at very cheap rates, usually from absentee owners. In addition to his own two story house, he now owns 16 other lots, and is in the process of transferring ownership of them to other white nationalists. He recruits them by going onto internet hate sites and encouraging them to move to Leith, become residents and vote in elections, thereby putting the small town under Nazi control.

In the posting, threaded through the white supremacist Vanguard News website, he writes: “A few well know (sic) WN (White Nationalists) know of this plan; fewer still know the exact place. Suffice to say, you could also make it into the Bakken area to go for a job there too. I wfcant people to move now and quietly get going here without letting the cat out of the bag.”

One of the white nationalists who own property now in Leith is Tom Metzger, a man dubbed “the most dangerous racist in America”– who was prominently featured in Louis Theroux’s BBC Documentary “Louis and The Nazis” (it’s old, but so worth watching). Another is Alex Linder, creator of the Vanguard News Network, a prominent hate site.

While Cobb’s rampant purchasing of vacant properties looked suspicious at first to town officials and residents– they had even asked him about it, and he told them that his plan was to buy up all the property so he could rename the town Cobbsville– they were unaware of his real plan until fairly recently. Still, his activities seemed suspect enough to spur other residents to start buying up property themselves in order to prevent him from getting his hands on more.

Last week, Ryan Lenz, a writer for Hatewatch, an investigative magazine published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, had clocked some of Cobb’s postings on Vanguard News Network and other hate sites, and came down to apprise the mayor of the situation.

The Mayor, Ryan Schock, was understandably surprised. Within hours he called the County Sheriff to see what could be done.

Sheriff Steve Bay checked up on some of the men working on repairing one of Cobb’s properties, but was unable to find anything on them. He called Canada to see if they wanted to extradite him, and Canada was pretty much like “No, you can keep that one.”

For now, there is little the Mayor and the residents can do to keep Cobb and his batshit Nazi friends out, other than continue trying to buy up property themselves and do what they can to let them know they’re unwelcome. As creepy and intimidating as this is– so far, it’s not illegal.